happen at a higher level," Rosen says.
"The way things were manufactured, or
the way people took care in how they
shipped the merchandise, was important
to the process of having a successful com-
pany." He was good at communicating
with the people working the machines; he
has a streetwise accent that does not be-
speak inherited wealth, though Puritan, at
one point, had thirty manufacturing facil-
ities and annual sales of three hundred
million dollars. "My father was the boss,
which was an advantage in a way, but it
didn't entitle me to anything," he says. "I
had to work."
In 1983, Carl died of cancer, and An-
drew, at the age of twenty-six, took over as
C.E.O. of Puritan. "I may have thought
that I was well equipped and really smart,
but I didn't in any way, shape, or form fully
understand the magnitude of what I was
doing," Rosen says. Profits started falling
off, and within a year Calvin Klein and
Barry Schwartz had completed a takeover
of Puritan and installed a new C.E.O.
Schwartz asked Rosen to stay on, in an
executive role, and within four years Klein
and Schwartz had named him president
of the company. A year later, he quit. "I
just felt like that wasn't the place for
me," he told me. "Everyone assumed I
was there because it's my family's busi-
ness." He spent six years as the C.E.O. of
Anne Klein and then was fired, because of
disagreements over the brand's strategy.
Around this time, Rosen and his wife,
Adrian Mottola, divorced; they have two
children, Austin and Ashley.
By the mid-nineties, Rosen was ready
to start his own company. He launched a
partnership with Elie Tahari, the Israeli
designer, whose eponymous label was
using new fabrics from Italy that subtly
incorporated Lycra. One day, Tahari
brought in a pair of pants for Rosen to try
on. "They were very stretchy---they were
very slim, but they were very comfort-
able and terrific," Rosen says. "And I said,
'We're going to do this.' " Rose Marie
Bravo, then the president of Saks Fifth
Avenue, recalls her first encounter with
the new pants. "In walks Andrew, and he
had a pair of pants in his hand, and he
said, 'I am starting this company, and I
am calling it Theory, and I am going to
sell this pant.' And I looked at it and I
said, 'I love it.' It was just the kind of thing
that every gal could wear and look ten
pounds thinner."
Like his father, Rosen had noticed a
shift in the way women wanted to dress.
"The world was changing from a world of
people who go to an office to work to a
world where people's lives were becoming
more versatile, because of cell phones and
the Internet," Rosen says. Theory's pants
had a modern silhouette, but the stretch
made them comfortable enough to wear at
home, and they retained their shape. As
Rosen puts it, "You could wear it today,
and you could wear it tomorrow, and
it will still look good." Such versatility
doesn't come cheap: most of Theory's
pants for women cost between two and
three hundred dollars.
Rosen chose the name Theory because
he wanted a brand identity that was inde-
pendent of any individual designer. At the
outset, he told Schwartz, who remains a
friend, that Theory could be a fifteen- or
twenty-million-dollar business. By 2003,
it had annual sales of more than two hun-
dred million, at which point Rosen and
Tahari sold the company to the Japanese
conglomerate that owns Uniqlo. Rosen,
who received forty-nine million dollars
and an eleven-per-cent stake in the com-
pany, was supposed to stay on for just a
year. But his Japanese bosses wanted him
to stay longer; though he sold the last of
his stake in 2006, he has served as C.E.O.
ever since. (Several years ago, Tahari sued
Rosen, claiming that he had never in-
tended to leave the company, and that
Rosen had induced him to sell his stake
below fair market value; the court sided
with Rosen, throwing out the majority of
Tahari's claims.)
Theory is now nearly a billion-dollar
business. In 2006, Rosen's Japanese bosses
bought the Helmut Lang brand, which
had been languishing since the German
designer retired from the fashion business;
Rosen chose Michael and Nicole Colo-
vos, who are married, to reinvent the label.
In 2010, Rosen hired Olivier Theyskens,
the lauded Belgian designer, to be the cre-
ative director of Theory and to design his
own, higher-end line, Theyskens' Theory.
Independently, Rosen has made major in-
vestments in emerging fashion brands, in-
cluding Rag & Bone, which makes the
kind of understated sportswear favored by
celebrities off the red carpet; Alice &
Olivia, which sells bright-colored frocks
and separates; and Proenza Schouler,
which offers luxury womenswear in re-
fined, tailored fabrics. Though the brands
have little in common, all are prospering
under Rosen's guidance. "He has an un-
believable head for business," Schwartz
says. "His father built a company, but
compared to what Andrew built---they
are not even in the same league."
Rosen is particularly adept at finding
ways to broaden the appeal of boutique
labels. When he partnered with Jack
McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, of
Proenza Schouler, the label was being
sold exclusively on the racks of high-end
department stores. Rosen steered them
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